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The amount of land needed to grow crops worldwide is at a peak, and an area more than twice the
size of France can return to nature by 2060 because of rising yields and slower population growth,
a group of experts said.

The report, conflicting with U.N. studies that say more cropland will be needed in coming
decades to avert hunger and price spikes as the world population increases beyond 7 billion, said
humanity had reached what it called “peak farmland.”

More crops for use as biofuels and a shift toward more meat consumption in emerging economies
such as China or India — demanding more cropland to feed livestock — would not offset a decline
from the peak driven by improved yields, it calculated.

If the report is correct, the land freed up from crop farming will be about 10 percent of what
is in use. That’s equivalent to 2.5 times the total area of France, Europe’s biggest country other
than Russia, or more than all the arable land farmed in China.

“We believe that humanity has reached peak farmland, and that a large net global restoration of
land to nature is ready to begin,” said Jesse Ausubel, director of the Program for the Human
Environment at Rockefeller University in New York.

“Happily, the cause is not exhaustion of arable land, as many had feared, but rather moderation
of population and tastes and ingenuity of farmers,” he wrote in a speech about the study.

The report projected that almost 370 million acres could be restored to natural conditions such
as forest by 2060. That is also equivalent to 1.5 times the area of Egypt or 10 times Iowa’s.

The report said global arable land and permanent crop areas increased from 3.38 billion acres in
1961 to 3.78 billion acres in 2009. It projected a decline to 3.41 billion acres by 2060.

In contrast, a June 2012 report by the U.N.’s Food and Agricultural Organization said that an
extra net 172.9 million acres of land worldwide would have to be cultivated in 2050: “Land and
water resources are now much more stressed than in the past and are becoming scarcer,” that report
said, referring to factors such as soil degradation and salinization.

The study’s authors said that the idea of “peak farmland” was borrowed from the phrase
peak oil, shorthand for the possibility that global supply of petroleum has reached its
maximum level.